Injured Garfield butcher lauded for smoked meat

All the ingredients for a nasty explosion were in place: the Garfield Meat Shop smokehouse room was full of leaking propane and no oxygen. A few burning wood embers were on the floor of the closed room.

All it needed was oxygen. When Garfield butcher Tom Tevlin opened the door, the explosion blew him across the room, nearly removing both of his hands and an ear and singeing off his hair.

The accident three years ago burned almost a third of Tevlin’s body and landed him in Harborview Medical Center at Seattle for a month.

Today, Tevlin’s dogged determination to recover from his injury not only put the 47-year-old back to work but recently earned Tevlin two awards from the Northwest Meat Processors Association.

“The [doctors] said, ‘Well, we’re going to cut your hands off.’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s what I do. I work with my hands! That’s my business,’” Tevlin said in an interview with the Gazette April 5 in the foyer of Garfield Meats.

The career-long butcher said when he learned what was at stake— not just his physique but his job too- he reached within and began a very determined goal to get better.

“I set my mind to do everything I could at the hospital,” he said, softly recounting how he underwent several skin grafts and the gruesome therapy a burn victim must endure; having dead skin sloughed off every morning.

His wife, Windy, said the accident was horrific for their family, but learning Tom would be able to keep his hands was certainly a turn toward the positive.

“I was overjoyed because that would have been horrific to have to live through. It’s his passion. He loves that meat shop,” Windy said.

Misty-eyed, Tom Tevlin said life has been a different thing since the accident; he holds the people he loves more closely. Accidents in other peoples’ lives, such as the Idaho avalanche tragedy that took the lives of two Colfax men last week, carry more emotional weight for him.

“I try to find more time with my kids and my wife,” he said.

After the accident, the Garfield community pitched in to help him rebuild the smokehouse. Tevlin has recently used the facility to achieve recognition in his chosen trade.

Tevlin received a second and third place in two smoked meat categories from the Northwest Meat Processors Association at their convention last month at Lincoln City, Ore. The association includes meat processing plants in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

Garfield Meat Shop placed third out of 32 entries in the ham with the bone-in category. Tevlin said quietly he was most pleased with this one as every custom meat plant in the northwest association tries to enter a ham every year.

“To be able to come back [from the accident] and stand next to those guys is a big deal for me,” he said.

The Garfield Meat Shop opened its doors in 1955 with Roy Hasenoehrl as proprietor.

Tevlin graduated from Spokane’s Rogers High School in 1980 and later worked for a meat processing plant in Pasco for 10 years.

In Pasco he met his wife, Windy. They purchased the Garfield shop from the Hasenoehrls in 1996. Their children Colt, 27, and Chrystal, 24, graduated from Colfax High School.

Garfield Meat Shop specializes in custom processing meat from local producers. Though they butcher mostly cattle, the shop also processes pigs, lamb and goats. Farmers around Whitman County, and some from Adams County, hire Tevlin or a shop employee to drive to their ranch and butcher their animals.

They then take orders on how the customer would like the animal processed with specifics such as the thickness of steaks or the amount of fat to leave.

Today, Garfield Meat Shop is 55 years old.

The distinctive smell of cold, curing meat, fresh yet sterile, wafts through the clean Garfield Meat Shop the day of the interview.

The rhythmic slice of an employee slicing beef muscle from bone comes in softly over the consuming buzz of the meat freezers in back. A hip-high bin of solid scraps of fat, tendon and bone sits at the side.

During the interview, Tevlin was processing cattle from the Corde Siegel farm in the Rosalia area.

“To come back from having a smokehouse that was blown apart, replacing it with a new unit, then coming back in three years with this- this is a big deal for me,” he said.

During the interview, he pulls back a sleeve to reveal one long, scarred arm. He points to several skin grafts, saying how he was fortunate to have made a fast recovery. The accident happened March 5, 2007, and he was back processing meat by May of that year, he said.

“My scars have gotten smaller and smaller over time,” he said.